Exploring and Building Open [Source] Software for Learning Ecosystems

Experience Design / Education / Multi-device / Grav CMS

Having just finished my 20th offering (in 20 years, how did that happen?) of CMPT-363 at SFU I will be getting back to posting more frequently about my on-going work with Grav in the field of education… stay tuned.

This little project is the result of both a new need for my Fall 2017 CMPT-363 Course Hub (notice the Paul’s Web Pick of the Week in the sidebar) and wanting to create an example illustrating how Grav natively supports custom content page types and modular content.

I’ve been once again feverishly working in the open on the Fall 2017 Course Hub (built with my Grav Open Course Hub and using a flipped-LMS approach, naturally!) for SFUCMPT 363 so that potential students can better self-assess course fit before our first class meets in-person on Sept 6th.

The year brings some changes, with the addition of an individual component (reflective learning log) to the two group assignments and an expansion of the individual usability assessment assignment. Students will research and design potential user experience improvements for an open source project of their choice.

Here is the list of apps I am using to reach my pedagogical and student/facilitator experience goals this term (with lots of open source goodness):

It was created to support the pedagogical goals for the course while also delivering a better experience for both my students and myself (oh my!). Open source software plays an essential role in the ecosystem, with the modern and database free Grav CMS as the central environment for the course (and a single URL), with linkages to Rocket.Chat, Swipe, Sandstorm and SFU’s Canvas LMS.

Using an institutionally-hosted GitLab instance gives students the direct ability to shape (and contribute to) the Open Course Hub while giving me, the instructor, a highly efficient Markdown-based Git workflow - with updates to Course Hub content in as little as 30 seconds.🚀

Pedagogical goals are unmet by the current Learning Platform (e.g. LMS or CMS) alone
Since the Course Hub is built with the open source and extensible Grav CMS and an individual instance of Grav is used for each course, tech-savvy educators have virtually no limits to what additional elements they can embed into their own Course Hubs.

Student and facilitator experiences, especially multi-device, are below expectations
The two available Course Hub themes (the default theme is built with Bootstrap and the alternative theme is built with Zurb Foundation) are completely responsive, and Grav’s speedy performance further enhances multi-device delivery of content.

Ability to access, share and collaboratively edit course materials is lacking
Using the Git Sync Plugin, Grav pages be automatically stored and edited with modern collaborative ecosystem tools such as GitHub, GitLab, and GitBook.

The creation and (often frequently needed) updating of online course materials is too time consuming
Once again thanks to the Git Sync Plugin, course hub contributors can synchronize Course Hub content (even including theme files) to their own desktop and use the text editor of their choice to update content. Edits, and pushing updates to a live Course Hub site, can be done in as little as 30 seconds.

Once created, online course materials are difficult to repurpose on different platforms for different contexts
Since Grav CMS uses Markdown, which is rapidly becoming the modern standard for platform-independent markup of content, the opportunities for repurposing content is steadily increasing.

Unable to leverage existing Web authoring skills or standards on the current Learning Platform
With Grav CMS built using many of today’s best standards (i.e. Markdown, Twig, YAML, etc.) and extensible architecture both educators and students can further shape the Course Hub using their Web authoring skills.

In addition, the Grav Open Course Hub was intentionally designed to work with your existing Learning Platform (by ‘flipping’ it, where an open platform such as the Grav CMS is in the control of course participants and serves as an alternative front-end to the institutional LMS). This means that instructors can immediately start to address the above problems while still using their existing Learning Platform to store sensitive student data and other course requirements. View this approach in action on my 2016 CMPT-363 User Interface Design course site.